The Aftermath

Following the battle of Gettysburg, you can imagine the extensive damage and horrific sights that travelers and townsfolk saw. The thousands of dead littered the fields north, west, and south of town. The larger portion of the casualties were the wounded. Houses, barns, sheds, and nearly every public building became a makeshift hospital. Not until the opening of Camp Letterman on July 22, 1863 would there be a general hospital.

I will discuss the care of the wounded in another entry. This entry will focus on the dead, and how the battlefield appeared after the first 3 days in July. Minimal effort was put forth to bury the dead during the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd - after all, the armies were fighting a major battle and needed all the manpower they could muster. When General Lee abandoned the battlefield and started his march towards Maryland, and ultimately Virginia, the responsibility of cleaning up the battlefield was left in Union hands. Burying thousands of Union dead was not an enviable task, and the concern for the Confederate dead was somewhat lacking after 3 days of bitter combat. Therefore, the battlefield was littered with the refuse of war, and for several weeks remained that way.

Private John Haley, from a Maine regiment, was on picket duty in the "Valley of Death" during the night of July 3rd. Around midnight he noted that "The dead lay everywhere, and although not a half day has passed since they died, the stench is so great that we can neither eat, drink, nor sleep. Decomposition commences as soon as life is extinct...The dead are frightfully smashed, which is not to be wondered at when we consider how they crowded up to our guns, a mass of humanity, only to be hurled back an undistinguishable pile of mutilated flesh, rolling and writhing in death. No tongue can depict the carnage, and I cannot make it seem real: men's heads blown off or split open; horrible gashes cut; some split from the top of the head to the extremities, as butchers split beef"

Robert Stiles, a Confederate officer, noted on July 5th that "the sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable -- corpses swollen to twice their original size, some of them actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gasses and vapors. I recall one feature never before noted, the shocking distension and protrusion of the eyeballs of dead men and dead horses. Several human or unhuman corpses sat upright against a fence, with arms extended in the air and faces hideous with something very like a fixed leer, as if taking a fiendish pleasure in showing us what we essentially were and might at any moment become. The odors were nauseating, and so deadly that in short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely."

On July 7th, citizen Robert Carter wrote near the Trostle house that "The scenes of that spot...still linger in our memories...masses of Kershaw's and Wofford's Brigade advanced up to the muzzles of these guns, which had been loaded either with double shotted canister or spherical case, with fuzes cut to one second -- to explode near the muzzles -- [termed 'rottenshot' by artillerymen] -- had literally [been] blown to atoms -- and in a moments brief space into eternity. Corpses strewed the ground at every step. Arms, legs, heads, and parts of dismembered bodies were scattered all about, and sticking among the rocks, and against the trunks of trees, hair, brains, entrails, and shreds of human flesh still hung, a disgusting sickening, heartrending spectacle to our young minds. It was indeed a charnel house -- a butcher's pen -- with man as the victim. One man had as many as twenty canister or case shots through different parts of his body, though none through a vital organ, and he was still gasping and twitching with a slight motion of the muscles, and vibrations of the pulse, although utterly unconscious of approaching death."

On July 9th, citizen J. Howard Wert wrote one of the most vivid accounts of how the farms and fields appeared after the battle. Wandering along Plum Run, Wert stumbled upon a part of the stream that was "clogged with the dead bodies of Confederates cut down by the fire of [infantry]...and [the] terrific missiles of Bigelow's artillery...Immediately after the battle were heavy rains, and in this valley, so much was the course of the stream obstructed that great ponds were formed where the waters were dammed up by the swollen corpses of the Southern soldiery. The writer wandered over these fields immediately after the fierce strife had ceased, and the vivid impression of the horrible sights there beheld can never be effaced from the memory. Death in its ghastliest and most abhorrent forms, everywhere. Festering corpses at every step; some, still unburied; some, hastily and rudely buried with so little of earth upon them that the appearance presented was almost as repulsive as where no attempt at burial had been made. All the fields and woods from the Emmettsburg [sic] road to base of Round Top were one vast hideous charnel house. The dead were everywhere. In some cases nothing but a few mutilated fragments and pieces of flesh were left of what had been so late a human being following his flat to death or victory.
In the garden of the Rose house in full view...nearly one hundred rebels were buried. All around the barn, even within the house yard, within a few feet of the doors, were, in numbers, the scantily buried followers of the Confederate cause. Two hundred and seventy-five were buried behind the barn; a rebel colonel [Hance, 53rd Georgia] was buried within a yard of the kitchen door. No pen can paint the awful picture of desolation, devastation, and death that was presented hereto the shuddering beholder who traversed these localities July 4, 5, and 6, 1863. Fences and fruits of the earth had alike disappeared before the withering besom of destruction. All was a trodden, miry waste with corpses at every step, and the thick littered debris of battle-broken muskets and soiled bayonets, shattered caissons and blood-defiled clothing, trodden cartridge boxes and splintered swords, rifled knapsacks and battered canteens. When a description of a scene such as was presented on these fields...is attempted words have lost their power and language is weak."